Detainees, U.S. guards clash at Guantanamo Bay

By Greg Botelho and Barbara Starr, CNN

Updated 1034 GMT (1734 HKT) April 15, 2013

Photos: Inside Guantanamo Bay23 photos

Inside Guantanamo Bay – President Barack Obama signed an executive order on January 22, 2009, to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. Nearly six years later, the prison for terrorism suspects remains open. Click through for a look inside the controversial facility. Here, President George W. Bush's official picture is replaced by Obama's in the lobby of the headquarters of the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo on January 20, 2009, the day the latter was sworn in as president.

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Inside Guantanamo Bay – The U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay has held terror suspects since January 2002. Early in the war on terror, the Bush administration argued these detainees were "enemy combatants" who didn't have the protections accorded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Here, a detainee stands at an interior fence at Guantanamo Bay in October 2009.

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Inside Guantanamo Bay – A Navy sailor surveys the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in October 2009. In December 2013, Congress passed a defense spending bill that makes it easier to transfer detainees out of the facility.

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Inside Guantanamo Bay – U.S. military guards move a detainee inside the detention center in September 2010. At its peak, the detainee population exceeded 750 men at Guantanamo.

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Inside Guantanamo Bay – A military doctor holds a feeding tube used to feed detainees on a hunger strike at a Camp Delta hospital at Guantanamo in June 2013. In March 2013, the U.S. military announced that dozens of detainees had begun a hunger strike. By that June, more than 100 detainees were on a hunger strike, and more than 40 were being force-fed, military officials said.

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Inside Guantanamo Bay – Muslim detainees kneel during early morning prayers in October 2009. Cells are marked with an arrow pointing in the direction of Mecca, regarded as Islam's holy city.

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Inside Guantanamo Bay – A soldier stands near a placard on the fence line of the detention facility in January 2012.

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Inside Guantanamo Bay – A Quran sits among a display of items isssued to detainees in September 2010. The suspects are given a prayer mat and a copy of the Muslim holy book as well as a toothbrush, soap, shampoo and clothing.

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Photos: Inside Guantanamo Bay – A U.S. military guard walks out of the maximum security section of the detention center in September 2010.

Guantanamo Bay detainees wielding "improvised weapons" clashed Saturday with guards, an episode that occurred amid simmering tensions at the U.S. military base.

The U.S. guards responded by firing "four less-than-lethal rounds," the military's Joint Task Force Guantanamo said in a statement. No guards or detainees suffered "serious injuries" at the facility in Cuba.

The incident, which happened in Camp VI at the detention center, comes as some inmates have waged a weeks-long hunger strike in protest of their treatment, guards searching through Qurans and other issues.

Since 2002, the Guantanamo detention center -- where people have been held in a range of conditions, from communal living to lone, maximum-security cells -- has held people captured outside the United States in counterterrorism operations. As of November 2012, there were 166 detainees in the facility, according to a government report.

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"It leaves them with the prospect of the only way we leave Guantanamo is death," Warner said. "Unfortunately, I think the men are ready to embrace this."

Early Saturday, the commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo ordered all inmates in Camp VI moved into individual cells. The reason, the military explained, was "to ensure the health and security of those detainees."

The clashes occurred while guards tried to move inmates.

Capt. Robert Durand, a Guantanamo spokesman, said the decision was made after detainees starting in February -- about the same time as latest hunger strike -- began obstructing surveillance cameras, windows and glass partitions. These actions, which Durand described as "non-compliant" and "unacceptable," made it difficult for guards to do "round-the-clock monitoring" throughout the facility.

"Suspending the detainees' communal living privileges was in response to a coordinated effort by detainees to create an unsafe situation and limit the guard force's observation," the military spokesman said.

"... The ability to continuously monitor detainees is the only way we can provide for their health and security. We should have gone in earlier."

Warner, the public defender for some Guantanamo detainees, has said frustrations have grown since a change in command last year, which was followed by a number of new policies.